Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming January 2017 24 12 months to make sure O Media is a company that focusses on social media. People want their news and their information and their entertainment right now. They don’t want it next month, they don’t want it next week, they don’t even want it tomorrow morning. When news breaks, people want it on their phones immediately. That’s the direction the world is headed. So we have to do that and we have to create content that is distributed to people’s phones directly. The content needs to be made for that distribution medium, rather than simply taking a news or magazine article and just posting it online. That’s not really very effective. But it’s very necessary to have a paper magazine or newspaper to give your media organization credibility, because there are millions of what I call JAWs – Just Another Website. Anybody can create a website, but by having a beautiful, glossy magazine or a broadcast TV station or a radio station or a traditional newspaper, that gives your electronic product credibility. So in Macau we’re not doing that very well. We are making some inroads – some of the companies are doing some things well, so we have websites and a social media presence – but that natively created electronic media content is not very strong yet in Macau. That’s certainly the direction we’re going to be heading in the next 12 months. BB: Is the media in Macau influenced by mainland China? AWS: It depends what you mean by that. If you mean is it influenced by the mainland Chinese Government and does the mainland Chinese government put pressure on media companies in Macau, I would say absolutely not. As CEO of O MEDIA, I’ve never, ever had any member of any government department lean on me directly or indirectly to either publish something or not publish something. In fact, this is one of the biggest misconceptions in the West – that Hong Kong and Macau media are heavily influenced by the mainland. It’s never happened to us and I’ve spoken to the other media proprietors who say it has never happened to them either. If your question means is the content we create influenced by things that happen in China, then yes, absolutely we are. Macau is part of China and even though it’s a very different part of China, what happens in China really affects what happens in Macau in many ways. We’ve constantly got an eye to China and what is happening there when it comes to our reporting of news for the region. BB: Finally Andrew, what is O Media’s long term plan? AWS: Well, with apologies to our friends “Media is changing and it’s a challenge for traditional media companies to handle that change. Revenues are down and they are down because user- generated content is a big thing, social media is a huge thing.” Some of the O Media crew hard at work O MEDIA recently launched luxury leisure and lifestyle publication High Life INSIGHTS in the other Macau media companies, our vision is to be the largest media company in Macau. And by that I mean to capture the largest number of eyeballs – a very large chunk of the over 30 million people who visit Macau each year. Our goal is to be a one-stop shop for companies outside of Macau who want to get their message to those affluent people who visit Macau. We’re even hiring people in positions that have long-term plays, where the pay-off for those positions won’t really be seen for maybe three or five years or more. So we’re planning long term and will hopefully soon have more than 100 staff with many media channels – not just print media but digital media, outdoor media and whatever it is that the times dictate. As society changes, we will change with it.